Point Reyes Light - October 19, 2000
Labor shortage hobbles West Marin businesses
By Stephen Barrett
As the Station House Cafe’s dining room filled up over the Labor Day weekend, Point Reyes Station restaurateur Pat Healy lamented that for the first time in 27 years she actually had too much business. The kitchen was short-handed and chaotic, and the likelihood of finding an available dishwasher was nil.
It takes a staff of 40 to 50 full- and part-time employees to keep the Station House Cafe open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but this summer many of those shifts were filled with overtime hours by a workforce that was exhausted long before Labor Day arrived, Healy said.
Finally, without enough employees to keep her restaurant running smoothly, Healy decided to close the Station House Cafe on Wednesdays starting this week until further notice.
The problem is mirrored all over West Marin, from the restaurants of Stinson Beach to the county education center at Walker Creek: jobs at restaurants, bed-and-breakfasts, retail stores, and schools have gone begging.
Housing out of reach
Although a low unemployment rate is generally a sign of a healthy economy, it has placed West Marin at a decided disadvantage for attracting workers. The service-oriented businesses here simply cannot offer wages high enough to offset the stratospheric cost of housing or compensate for a long commute by workers living over the hill.
Like the Station House Cafe, the Inverness Store and Debra’s Bakery in Inverness Park have shortened their hours to cope with what’s becoming a chronic shortage of help.
Inverness Store owner Al Irish said he needs 12 full-time employees to keep his supermarket open seven days a week during the winter. He has only six full-timers now, and has been searching for checkers and clerks all year long without success. The store is now closed on Tuesdays due to lack of help.
The Inverness Store’s classified ads offer $10 to $12 an hour plus benefits for checkers and clerks, and competitive starting salaries for a manager and deli manager. Still, no one calls for these jobs, Irish said, because most workers have been priced out of living in West Marin and can now find these wages much closer to home.
Fewer kids around
Irish looks at Marin’s 1.7 percent unemployment rate – the lowest of any California county – and notes that businesses throughout the Bay Area are struggling to find workers. Compounding the problem here, he said, is the loss of families with children who used to hold afterschool jobs.
"We’ve been here 25 years," he said. "This is the worst it’s ever been. It’s a sign of the times.... Over the years, we’ve had a great selection of kids who’ve come to work for us. They go away to school and come back to work summers. That’s dried up."
Two years after opening Debra’s Bakery in Inverness Park, owner Debra Ruff said it has been an uphill battle to get the business running to her expectations. Like Irish, she has found few local workers available in West Marin and has turned to advertising, unsuccessfully, in the help wanted sections of The San Francisco Chronicle and Santa Rosa Press Democrat.
The bakery is now open five days a week, up from four days a week during the summer, but Ruff said it needs to be open six days a week to make business worthwhile. Without bakers and counter workers, she said, it has been impossible to delegate the day-to-day tasks and concentrate instead on growing her business.
Long commute
"It’s been hard to step out and get the bakery going like I want to because I’m so busy here working," she said. "I’ve spent hundreds of dollars advertising [for help]. We got a few responses from The Chronicle, but sometimes the phone won’t ring for weeks. The economy is good. People aren’t going to drive long hours out here if the wages aren’t that good."
Contractor Dennis Rodoni said the worker shortage is affecting his construction company just as significantly, with both skilled and unskilled employees in short supply. He said local contractors cannot compete over the hill for workers when construction jobs are so abundant everywhere. As a result, he said, he must do more work with less help.
"We do really well when there’s a slow period," he said. "There’s enough money out here that we can attract people when there’s little work around. We’ll have to keep offering more money to get people to come back to work in West Marin."
But it is unlikely that working wages will catch up to housing costs in the foreseeable future. Last month, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition reported that it takes an annual income of roughly $58,360 – or $28 per hour – to afford market-rate housing in Marin. However, the coalition reports, the median income paid to wage earners in Marin is $32,000, or about $15 per hour.
Out-of-county workers
Because of the disparity between housing costs and wages, Marin’s workforce is increasingly coming from neighboring counties. This year, the Marin Economic Commission estimates that the number of workers commuting from Sonoma to Marin County will increase to 17,364, up from 15,365 in 1990. The number of commuters from Sonoma to Marin was 9,594 two decades ago.
Dan Dawson, a demographics researcher for the Economic Commission, said the shortage of workers is a countywide phenomenon resulting from the failure to provide enough affordable housing to retain a local workforce. He said the proposed EAH housing in Point Reyes Station would help alleviate West Marin’s problem but not of course solve it.
He conceded that existing county residents don’t generally support high-density housing in settled areas, even though such developments have proven popular with new residents in cities such as San Rafael.
‘Cultural shift’ needed
"There’s certainly plenty of very large, million-dollar homes on the market, but very few smaller homes selling at affordable rates," he said. "Theoretically, everyone would like to have their two-acre spread with a ranch home, but that’s not a reality. It will take some kind of cultural shift..."
"It’s tough to replicate a [high-density] project in a rural setting like Point Reyes, but I think it’s politically more feasible than subdividing the countryside," he said.
West Marin’s combination of parkland, its tourist-serving economy, and its resistance to new development makes it more akin to resort regions like Lake Tahoe than to other parts of the Bay Area, said research director Paul Fessinger of the Association for Bay Area Governments.
In the absence of new development, Fessinger anticipated that employers will be forced to offer above-average wages to attract workers to remote West Marin and cater their business more and more towards a tourist clientele. "You start to bid up the wages," he explained, "and charge more to the tourists coming in."
Catering to locals
But Debra Ruff said she opened her Inverness Park bakery to serve the neighborhood and depends on local support. Without local establishments, she added, West Marin will lose something of itself.
"I almost feel like it’s going to become the community’s problem, not just the business owners’," she said. "The locals are important to me. I depend on them for the wintertime, so I do try to cater to them. I think this is going to start affecting our community."
Ruff said she tries to build a sense of teamwork and share the workload and profits with her employees to keep them satisfied. "I have a great crew right now," she said, "and I want to keep them."
Restaurateur Healy said she is entirely beholden to workers like chef Dennis Bold, cooks Lourdes Davalos and Armando Gonzalez, gardener and maintenance man, Gilberto Rodriguez, and several other core employees for her success.
She said workers like these, who have come up through the ranks and proven dependable through years of service, have become nearly impossible to find in West Marin. But without new employees to share the workload, Healy said, the morale of her staff – and the reputation of her restaurant – can only suffer.
"I don’t know what the future will be," she said. "It scares me....I don’t like to look at 27 years in business and have to wonder if my staff can give our customers what they expect. The best of the best is what we’ve always striven for."